Tuesday, August 30, 2011

George Adamski was a blatant charlatan, but one with charisma and some inventive flying saucer photographs and stories.

Flying Saucer Pictorial, Max Miller’s 1967 magazine, provided a segment of a Kodachrome 16 mm film that Adamski took, and which shows, as the magazine has it, two objects in the sky.

But the real object, that isn’t noted, is indicated at the arrow point in the reproduction here:

Then there is this shot of Adamski’s (in)famous flying saucer, which we all have seen somewhere, sometime:

What is interesting to me, is that Cedric Allingham (aka British astronomer, Patrick Moore) faked a flying saucer photo for the book Flying Saucer from Mars (which is being republished and will be reviewed by Nick Redfern), the fake saucer an almost identical replica of Adamski’s saucer:

How or why did Allingham/Moore do that? Perhaps Christopher Allen [CDA] can enlighten us, as he was one of the people who exposed Moore’s quirky hoax.

And finally, this juxtaposition of a photo by Adamski with one of the Trent/McMinnville UFO photos shows an almost identical flying disk. The Trent sighting and photo took place in 1950; while Adamski said his sighting and photo took place in 1951:

Note that Adamski’s “ship” has an engineering flaw: the craft has a slight chink in its rim, on the left side of the image. (Apparently, Mr. Adamski’s scissors slipped when he created the cut-out.)

What’s the point being made here, if there is one?

Adamski was imaginative and, as noted, inventive, to the extent that others, Allingham/Moore et al. emulated his creations.

Why Adamski’s chicken-brooder saucer became so iconic is beyond the scope of this writer, but it is interesting that Adamski’s concoctions (stories and photos) caught the imagination of the public, and still does, in some quarters.

One might conclude that Adamski was the progenitor of the ET idea that has infiltrated and consumed most followers and devotees of the UFO phenomenon, Stanton Friedman, among them.

And that’s my point: Adamski, as fraudulent as he was, created the flying saucer/UFO agenda [UFOs are ET craft] that we are stuck with to this day, at least some of us are……

Monday, August 29, 2011

Note the third paragraph, where Randle writes that "The military showed up in strength..."

Where's the substantiation, the citation that proves the military did, indeed, show up?

We have a number of other Randle articles, and many by Jerome Clark, which, in hindsight, indicate some sloppy reportage, and mind-sets that indicate a bias toward believability of accounts by anyone, anywhere when it comes to UFOs.

The questioning mind is absent by those fellows, at least, in their early incarnations as "ufologists."

Even Allen Hynek, who smothered the Mannor and Hillsdale flying saucer sightings in 1966 by attributing them to "swamp gas" fell for the faked 1967 Jaroslav photo seen here:

Hynek said that the "Analysis so far does not show any indication of an obvious hoax." [Flying Saucers Pictorial, 1967, Page 44].

The teenage Jaroslav brothers admitted, not long after, to making the "saucer" and faking the photograph.

Hynek was dismissed by reporters as unreliable after the 1966 "swamp gas" fiasco and he never regained credibility with news media after that episode.

He never regained credibility with us either.

We eschew the so-called noted ufologists because they've proven to be incompetent or just plain wrong, often back-tracking and making excuses for their earlier "nonsense."

One can forgive them, but one can't forget...their blunders and errant "research."

Then we find a rather well-known UFO photo that emulates the vapor-trail of the alleged Aurora prototype:

Wonders…lists some old sightings that also precede, by witness observation, the Aurora residue; e. g., Item 89 Page 96

My point?

That “modern” sightings antedate very similar, almost exact sightings and peculiarities as noted by Vallee, Aubeck, and Bragalia’s interests, among others, emulate ancient or older sightings which seem to confirm that something with a pattern is at work when it comes to UFO phenomena.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

There has, almost from the beginning of the modern UFO era (1947), been a few hypothetical thrusts saying that Earth might be a zoo where species have been brought or created and dispersed for extraterrestrial purposes which remain totally hidden.

The idea may seem fanciful at first glance, but isn’t outside the realm of possibility,

The idea, along with the penal colony thesis, can be elaborated upon and made sensible when one examines the idea that an alien species from other worlds, should there be any, could very well use the Earth as a laboratory or park containing animals, plants, humans, insects, reptiles, and other elements of life.

This would explain the vast array of UFO visitations over the years, and supports the hypothesis that alien beings have taken a particular interest in the Earth as regards atomic or ecological devastation, both of which having the potential to destroy eons of lab work or eliminating an extraterrestrial “vacation venue.”

Earth could be the lab-source for species meant to be seeded throughout the galaxies or, at least, one of the lab-sources.

Wikipedia has a succinct review of the Alien zoo hypothesis ,which may be read by clicking HERE.

For me, the zoo idea is not as zany as many other hypotheses which have pummeled UFO devotees of the years.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

{There are] 100 to 200 Billions galaxies in the visible or known universe with hundreds of billions of stars

An average galaxy contains between 1011 and 1012 stars. In other words, galaxies, on average have between 100 billion and 1 trillion numbers of stars

[Galaxies can be] small dwarf galaxies, with just 10 million or so stars, or they can be monstrous irregular galaxies with 10 trillion stars or more.
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NASA:

In 1999 the Hubble Space Telescope estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies in the universe, and recently with the new camera HST has observed 3,000 visible galaxies, which is twice as much as they observed before with the old camera. We're emphasizing "visible" because observations with radio telescopes, infrared cameras, x-ray cameras, etc. would detect other galaxies that are not detected by Hubble
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Wiki Answers:

Based on current estimates, there are between 200 - 400 billion stars in our galaxy (The Milky Way).

There are possibly 100 billion galaxies in the Universe. So taking the average of our galaxy, gives approximately 3 x 1024 stars. So about 3 septillion. This has been equated to the same number of grains of sand that are on Earth.

One source (BBC) stated that there are about 1,000 stars to every grain of sand on Earth!! There are an estimated 100 to 200 billion galaxies.

So taking a conservative number of 100 billion stars per galaxy gives an approximate total of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. (Which is 10 sextillion)
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Wikipedia:

Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to our Solar System. It lies about 4.37 light-years in distance, or about 41.5 trillion kilometres, 25.8 trillion miles or 277,600 AU.
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With the information above, how can anyone, with an ounce of rationality, think that UFOs represent visitors from galaxies, far, far away, or even from the nearest star system to Earth?

The Universe, with its vast diversity and intriguing panoply of astronomical or cosmological entities (by which we mean stars, planet, moons et al., not living beings), offers any curious alien intelligence much better sources for exploration than Earth which, in the great scheme of things, is a backwater and insignificant cosmological element, no matter how hard humans try to think otherwise.

Even if an alien exploratory team stumbled upon Earth millennia ago, what would stir them to keep visiting for centuries or eons afterward?

Of course, some ET believers say Earth was seeded by alien visitors and they keep coming back to see how their humanoid garden is doing.

Or Earth is a penal colony or some sort or a zoo, and extraterrestrial aliens keep checking in or visiting as if this lonely, remote planet is an integral part of a special alien agenda.

The idea that UFOs, with their abundant sightings, represent extraterrestrial visitations in light of the statistical probabilities above which open the whole Universe to such visitations, is ludicrous on the face of it.

No wonder that UFO devotees are seen as cranks and weirdos. Their thought processes invite the opprobrium.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Ufologists just have to get their hands on sightings released by government agencies; that welter of UFO sightings gathered from pilots, military people, and various other members of the population, the general citizenry.

And UFO devotees have to collect the plethora of books about UFOs that show up rather regularly, along with magazines, news-clippings, and web-pages or internet items.

What do UFO mavens or ufologists do with this collection of UFO detritus? Nothing – nothing at all.

They merely hoard it, sometimes giving it a cursory view.

Only a few use the collected material for research or as a supplement to hypothetical ratiocination.

The process of gathering such materials is a kind of addiction, a pathology that is endemic to the subject matter.

It’s not like coin collecting, or stamp collecting or baseball card collecting, which have a monetary value of some kind. It’s just a need to have a pile of stuff related to the UFO phenomenon, as if having it gives the collector a kind of authority just because of the ownership.

The UFO mystery has always attracted people with maladapted personalities.

That, in itself, is a matter for study, but no one with psychiatric or sociologic bona fides gives a good goddam.

(Remember, Zamora’s Socorro craft was accompanied by beings clothed in white, as were beings allegedly spotted outside Woomera, Australia, which some, us included, tied to the Solway Firth “spaceman” photo. And there are other sightings in which entities were garbed in shiny or white clothing or uniforms.)

And a look at cave art also raises the specter of strange beings mingling among early mankind (used by Alien Astronaut devotees for their hypothesis).

Then, of course, we all have access to hundreds, thousands actually, of UFO stories that have accumulated since 1947, and appear in books, television, and the internet.

But none of this data or information has taken us to an explanation of what flying saucers or UFOs were or are.

That dastardly skeptic Phil Klass said none of us would ever get an explanation for UFOs in our lifetime. His “prophecy” seems to be accurate, at least so far.

My point is that we have the data, lots of it, but we are nowhere near an explanation of what UFOs are or what their raison d’être might be.

And the chase has become wearying for some: Paul Kimball and a few fellows here, plus others who have dropped off the UFO merry-go-round.

Why Roswell remains an active source for UFO mavens. That incident had aspects of concretebility: recovered debris, alien bodies (supposedly), credible or near-credible witness accounts, an official Army Air Corps release, newspaper stories of a captured disk, and the status of a hardened myth.

Roswell is just as evanescent and non-determinant as the data mentioned above, but it, at least for the UFO die-hards, has elements that seem to be provable if one can just break through an alleged government/military cover-up.

However, in a final analysis, no amount of data or information with a UFO tinge is going to solve the mystery.

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Some time ago I found this passage in a book about the Shroud of Turin by Ian Wilson.

The passage fascinated me, but I couldn't find anything more about the snake incident, searching everywhere for something more definitive.

I even had several journalists look for something thta might elucidate the episode.

Recently I submitted a query and the book excerpt to Chris Aubeck's Magonia Exchange, and got (only) this reply:

The reference from Magonia might be the incident, but the time-frame is wrong, unless Wilson's date of 846 A.D. (or CE if you prefer) is wrong.

So, I'm asking if any one of our intrepid readers knows more about the alleged panic in Rome by a snake -- any date, any place in the city?

N.B. Chris Aubeck has provided what appears to be the answer to my query above. I thank him profusely for that and offer the link HERE that clarifies.

However, a member of Chris Aubeck's Magonia Exchange provides this:

I don't think the passage above (Regulus and the snake) has any relation to the episode mentioned by the original poster, the date is way too early (3rd century BC) and I doubt such a confusion is possible.

However a quick check in all the relevant medieval chronicles I could think of, didn't bring anything either. Even though the date of 846 AD is quite eventful for Rome which suffered that year an attack by the Saracens, no chronicle mentions an incident with a snake. Should it have happened that same year, I doubt the chroniclers would have missed mentioning it, if only to put in perspective with the invasion.
Thus, unless the incident is mentioned in a single obscure source, I would tend to believe that the date mentioned by Wilson is wrong.

In the fifteenth year of [the reign] of king Childebert [note: 590 A.D.], our deacon returning from the city Rome with relics of the saints reported that in the ninth month of the previous year the river Tiber so flooded the city of Rome that ancient buildings were destroyed and the store­houses of the church were overturned ; several thousand measures of wheat in them were lost. A multitude of snakes, and among them a great serpent [draco] like a big log, passed down into the sea carried away by the waters of the river, but these creatures, smothered among the stormy and salty waves of the sea, were rejected on the shore. Immediately after came the plague named inguinaria.

I don't know whether the two incidents are related but Gregory of Tours' story is the closest I could get to Wilson's mention. I'll keep looking though.

Reading through Wonders in the Sky by Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck [Penguin Group, NY, 2009] one is struck how most of those sightings from antiquity through the Middle Ages up to the beginning of the 20th Century have a direct or tangential connection to persons or enterprises that have a religious patina.

As aficionados of UFOs know, modern sightings, mainly from 1945 on, are secular in nature; that is, UFOs or flying saucers were not attendant or dependent upon a religious overlay.

Why is that?

I conjecture that UFOs had an umbilical connection to those events and people who believed in God and practiced the Faith, no matter if what the denomination or premise what was: Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Pagan, Mayan, Christianity, et alii.

But after the Death of God – and I believe that God died, not metaphorically as Nietzsche proposed, but actually – UFOs became attracted to humankind as a symbolic phenomenon, with meaning that has yet to be discerned.

Carl Jung’s magnificently clear rumination on the nature and reality of God in Answer to Job outlines how God, in a fit of divine despair, about how humans had been treated by Him and the vicissitudes of His creation, became incarnate, as Jesus Christ to atone for His (God’s) misbehavior, and ultimately die as a personal -- shall I say suicidal? – retribution to assuage the divine guilt.

However, that atonement, by partial Deicide, was short lived, and God’s aloof, distant, or hidden nature [See Richard Friedman’s The Hidden Face of God] brought about, in modern times, one of the most horrific episodes against humanity, and a chosen element of that humanity: The Holocaust.

In that human catastrophe and its aftermath, God died -- He either did Himself in (a total act of Decide) or died of a divine heartbreak; either way, God Himself – not his surrogate (Son) but God Himself died in h mid-1940s A.D.

Thus UFOs, whatever they were or are were transmogrified by the Divine denouement, but destined to intervene in human affairs by an eternal mandate of God, had to continue the “mission” and secular sightings became the norm, and the religious connection was set aside or lost from that point on.

This doesn’t explain, admittedly, what UFOs are, their essential makeup, nor their purpose. But it may explain by Vallee’s and Aubeck’s litany of ancient UFO sightings have been replaced by a litany of secular UFO sightings.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Noted authors Graham Hancock [Fingerprints of the Gods] and Robert Bauval [The Egypt Code] have written a new, 636 page book in which they “document” the influence of the Freemasons on human society, almost from time immemorial.

This reviewer is not inclined to put much stock into most theses that small groups of persons, banded together for purposes of controlling society or elements of society, are rife and accomplished.

The early Christians pulled off a kind of societal coup, with the help of a rabid psychotic, St. Paul and an emperor of Rome, Constantine. And Martin Luther, with the help of a king, Henry the Eighth created a blemish that removed the Catholic Church from its almost total domination of religious culture in Western Civilization.

But a small group of men, a sect or cult of secrecy, such as the Freemasons, ruling society, the World? The idea is fraught with incredulity.

But Hancock and Bauval make a more-than-circumstantial case for exactly that.

The Master Game is surfeited with little known facts and tidbits that enlighten, without forcing readers to adhere to the book’s primary raison d’être; that is, Masons and Freemasonry created cities and sites around the world as symbols of their purpose to control mankind.

The sub-title of the Hancock/Bauval book is “Unmasking the secret rulers of theworld” – a sub-title that mimics previous hypotheses and theories, about such groups as the Illuminati, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, Opus Dei, and even the mafia.

Joel Levy’s “The Secret Societies Bible” [Firefly Books, Buffalo, NY, 2010] is a preamble to the Hancock/Bauval book, and covers most of the same material with as many or more illustrations as those found in The Master Game.

Yet, Hancock and Bauval provide details from ancient history and connect dots that others have missed or ignored, such as the Hermetics with the [Christian] Gnostics and later on, Giordano Bruno and Napoleon, on to the Founding Fathers of The United States of America.

The book culminates in a raft of accusations that Al Qaeda and the Arab World are primarily attacking the Freemasonry-oriented nation of Israel and Zionists, using the odious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as the mandate for terrorism, ostensibly against Masonic-Zionism and those who adhere to the hidden Masonic practices that underlie Western governments.

The thrust of the book is this, according to the marketing materials: Iconic cities, Paris, Rome, Washington D.C., New York, London, were designed and created as giant temples with the intent of immersing residents in Masonic ideals.

Is such a thing possible, credible? You can read the book to see if the case has cachet. I remain skeptical, but have to admit that the supporting material and information make a believable case, if you are a person inclined to think that machinations by minority groups can control the bizarre vicissitudes of humankind, in toto.

The book is published by The Disinformation Company, Ltd., NY, 2011, Softcover, $24.95, and can be found at most bookstores, or online at Amazon, Powell’s, Barnes and Noble, et cetera.

Sunday, August 07, 2011

David J. Hufford, Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Psychiatry, Penn State College of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania provides the forward to Jacques Vallee’s and Chris Aubeck’s book (pictured above).

[Vallee in his books, Anatomy of a Phenomenon and Passport to Magonia] recognized the difference between the core phenomenology of [UFO] reports and the local language and interpretations that clothed that core in traditional accounts.

Criticizing conventional UFO investigators for “confusing appearance and reality” [Vallee] said that “The phenomenon has stable, invariant features….But we have also had to note carefully the chameleonlike character of the secondary attributes of the sightings.

The willingness of [Vallee and Aubeck] to cast a very wide net, andn ot to allow the particular cultural interpretations of events to limit their view, offers us a remarkable opportunity to seek patterns that may lead to new understandings.

Those with a view of these matters narrowly focused on a particular interpretation, especially the extraterrestrial idea, may be annoyed by the mixing of the aerial and the religious, the political and the mystical and more.

The problem with “spaceship” is not that it is anomalous; it is that it is an interpetation rather than an observation.

But Vallee and Aubeck undercut these judicious remarks by Professor Hufford by making these comments in their Introduction:

We will show that unidentified flying objects have had a major [sic] impact not only on popular culture but on our history, on our religion…

…the fact would remain that an unexplained phenomenon has played and continues to play a fantastically important role in shaping our belief systems, the way we view our history and the role of science.

…their [UFOs] impact has shaped human civilization in important ways.

UFOs have never had a “major” impact on humanity or civilization or history or religion.

The phenomenon has always been a remote and peripheral aspect of societal life, of human existence.

UFOs, today, are as inconsequential to humanity and society as a whole as they have always been, despite Vallee’s insistence that UFOs have been and are integral to life on Earth.